Macedonian migrants and national categories in Early Twentieth Century

“The ‘Yellow Peril’ of the
Caucasian Race:” Macedonian migrants and national categories in Early
Twentieth Century U.S. Governmental Sources.1

By Keith Brown

Colleagues in the United States
tend to smirk when they learn that Macedonia has an Institute for
National History. They imagine it, I think, as a place where
self-styled defenders of the nation pursue methodologically outdated
projects of positivistic, literalist research intended to prove beyond
any reasonable doubt that the historical roots of the Macedonian nation
are long and deeply embedded in the land. To pursue the organic metaphor
one step further, this view represents the Institute, and the project
of “Macedonian Identity through History,” as something akin to a
solitary, proud olive tree—gnarled, twisted, stubborn and
enduring—entire unto itself. I think there is, or can be, more to the
project of national history than that, and this paper is offered in that
spirit, as a kind of manifesto for an approach that resists dogmatism,
and recognizes the organic ties between Macedonian national history, and
history as practiced elsewhere.

Let me begin by articulating
five principles for the practice of national history. First, I attach
especially value to so-called “bottom-up” perspectives. In this I am
influenced by 1 Paper presented at Conference entitled “Macedonian
Identity through History,” Institute for National History, Skopje,
October 2008. I am grateful to the members of the Institute and
especially to its current director, Todor Cepreganov, for the invitation
to contribute to this event.

my training in socio-cultural
anthropology, which I share with fellow presenters Anastasia Karakasidou
and Goran Janev. When it comes to history, then, I take as my second
principle a sincere effort to hear voices, and try to enter the world of
the past, by as many paths as I can. Because I can’t have conversations
with people in the past, I am especially interested to find traces of
conversations or interactions, or arguments, in the archival record, and
eavesdrop on them. I call these moments of friction in the archive.

Third, I try to interpret these
voices in context, without imposing my own perspective or agenda, or
over-simplifying them. As a default, I approach them with humility: I am
all too aware that, let’s say, a butcher from Prilep around 1903 would
be suspicious of me, and might in fact ridicule me as a soft-handed
bureaucrat. I take the line that in his everyday life and speech, if his
descendants are anything to judge by, he was sometimes serious,
sometimes joking; playful, ironic and poetic, as well as brutally
straightforward, stubborn, or even pigheaded in different contexts. We
don’t know exactly how a conversation would go, especially if it turned
to national consciousness. Even for leaders like Goce Delchev, Pitu
Guli, Damjan Gruev and Jane Sandanski—the four national heroes named in
the anthem of the Republic—the written record of what they
believed about their own identity is open to different interpretations.
The views and self-perceptions of their followers and allies might well
be even more elusive.

My
fourth principle, then, is to let go of the idea of certainty. I
recognize that this runs counter to traditional historical and social
scientific commitments to uncovering truth. It also might appear to
betray those who see that commitment as a necessary and vital component
of their mission to counter deliberate efforts to erase or deny
contemporary Macedonians’ connection with the historical past. I should
therefore be clear that I am not calling for a post-modern abandonment
of empirically-grounded work. Nor do I refute that the historical record
provides ample evidence that in the period from 1870 until 1912,
Macedonia’s population was victimized by a variety of alien forces:
British consuls of the time described the fervor with which Grecomans
(or, in the local idiom, Grkomani), Arnauts, Bashi-bazouks, komiti,
antartes and chetniks robbed Slavic-speaking Christians of their rights
to worship as they chose, their property, and any sense of security.

All those named groups, though,
have passed into history, which brings me to the dimension of Macedonian
history that I find compelling, that the people whose stories, in the
last resort, constitute that history have, over the course of the 20th
century, demonstrated enduring resistance to grand narratives imposed
from outside or from above. So I see continuity in their continuous
skepticism toward any and all attempts by states—and their soft-handed
servants—to have the last word on who they “really” are (or who they are
not). I suggest that such attempts have been made by quite a number
of regimes—including for example Greece with regard especially to the
rural population in the area around Florina (Lerin) and Kastoria
(Kostur). The desire and drive to “fix” Macedonia’s population, using
contemporary terms that acquired their ethno-national significance only
late in the nineteenth century, represents what can be called
“historical totalitarianism”, and I consider it the fifth principle of
national history to resist historical totalitarianism, rather than enact
it, whether wittingly or not. This fifth principle, I suggest, brings
the national historian into closer communion with the particular
qualities...2 Although Douglas Dakin (1966) and others who rely mainly
on Greek documentation reject this figure as too high, I am persuaded by
the Bulgarian and Macedonian historians’ position, based on a wider
range of sources from Ottoman records and those of the Bulgarian state
and the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization. of endurance—what
Macedonians might term inaet—of those Prilep butchers and at the risk of
falling into paradox, I want to argue—drawing mainly on historical
sources documenting labor migration from Macedonia to the United States
in the early part of the twentieth century—that the continuity of
Macedonian national history is the continuous labor of generations of
Macedonians against various forms of historical totalitarianism.

These five principles inform
much of my ongoing work, from which this paper is derived. Here I
document the archival traces of labor migration from Turkey-in-Europe to
the United States of America in the early twentieth century. I learned
of the phenomenon of this migration from the Ilinden Dossier in the
National Archives in Skopje in 1993, and subsequently learned more from
the rich literature on pecalba or gurbet from a range of Macedonian and
foreign authors (Petrovski 1981: Konstantinov 1964: Gounaris
1989; Palairet 1979, 1987; Schierup and Alund 1987; Cvijic 1966; Petroff
1995). This is a phenomenon, of course, that cuts across history –from
early-mid nineteenth century movement into Greece, Serbia, Romania, and
Asia Minor, and later, to Europe as well as Australia, South Africa. It
remains a phenomenon today, as well. But my focus here is on the
specifics of movement in the period after the Ilinden Uprising of 1903.
As various sources have confirmed, upwards of 20,000 people—mostly men,
but some women—participated in the work of the Macedonian Revolutionary
Organization in those years.2 Where did they go? And in an atmosphere
where their true national identity is in much dispute, could we find
what they called themselves? In a sense, I was still operating in
the heroic discoverer mode of historical inquiry, anticipating that the
next folder, or the next fund, or maybe the next archive, would offer
the definitive proof, or the master-key, to resolve the question. So I
went to the National Archives in Washington DC in that frame of mind:
that the immigration records would offer a magisterial verdict on the
case of Macedonian national identity.

And of course, as anyone could
tell me (and probably, people did: I just didn’t hear them) it wasn’t so
straightforward. What I did find was that the passenger manifests
which record every arrival in the United States provide, as well as
conventional vital statistics—name, age, sex, profession—the reported
place of last residence—often a village name—and also destination,
nationality, and a category of “race or people”—the last of which
I focus on in this paper. These documents are not authoritative, and I
do not treat them as such: instead, they are the traces of a set of
interactions between different migrants and a bureaucracy composed of
different parts. It is the process of their assembly, rather than the
truth-claims that the final product distils, that I find compelling and
worth closer scrutiny.

I take the passenger manifests,
then, as examples of the kind of conversation or argument on which
historians can eavesdrop. In each case, the first draft of the
transcript of that conversation was produced by a steamship company in
interaction with the individual migrant or ticket-seller, all of whose
economic interest was to keep the traffic of people flowing – to secure
the entry of the individual, as well as meet the requirements of
the United States Federal Government. It was originally filled out with
an eye to what it was 3 In his memoir, which bears the signs of some
stylization or fictionalization, Stoyan Christowe vividly describes the
interactions that he and a fellow-immigrant had with an immigration
official and a translator (Christowe 1976: 134-139) meant to achieve. It
was then checked – authenticated, supposedly against physical
reality—by an inspector at the moment of entry on Ellis Island, or
Baltimore, or wherever else the alien made his or (less often) her way
onto US soil. That authentication, though, took place with its own
urgency. Ellis Island, for example, at the height of the traffic
in 1907, processed around 5000 aliens in the course of a six and a half
hour working day. At its maximum capacity, the Immigration station had
21 inspection lines operating. The average negotiation and revision of
the manifest, then, took place in roughly 30 seconds (Cowen 1932: 185).
If we recall the necessity for translation in many cases, there was very
little time for any correction to the record.3 Combined with the
abundant evidence, from investigations as well as memoirs of immigrants,
that the “address given” could often be unknown to the immigrant: that
patronymics were used in place of what would be institutionalized as
surnames: and that passports were frequently recycled and used
by different individuals, or were filled in with inaccurate information,
we need also to be cautious of using such material in any
straightforward, positivistic way.

So what can we do? The pathway I
follow here is to focus on the column headed “race or people,” and
compare the top-down logic which dictated what should appear in it
with the actual entries that do appear. The decision to create this
column, and collect this data, was made in the 1890s, in response to the
“new immigration” from the Russian, Austrian and, to a lesser extent,
Ottoman Empires. The list of races or peoples that was used was drawn up
in 1898 by a commission of scholars, bureaucrats, and front-line
employees of the Immigration Service (FIGURE 1).

FIGURE 1: LIST OF RACES OR PEOPLES, GENERATED IN 1898.

It
was a document that represented a mix of philosophical approaches to
the question of race: but the central principle was utilitarian. In
subsequent writing on the list, immigration officials recorded that it
took into account what associations they anticipated these new migrants
making with each other – the point was not, then, to speak in
a scholarly debate over head breadth –at a time when craniometry was
still considered serious science, there was never, as far as I have
determined, any suggestion that immigrants be systematically charted as
individuals in this way—but rather, to provide raw material on which
policy might be made which would bear in mind the kinds of social
support, educational or policing needs that cities might have to deal
with the new influx of manual laborers into cities and states.

The Immigration Service was,
then, interested in “historical races” and the industrial future, rather
than genetics (Fairchild 2003). The list is product of one particular
effort to distinguish between subjects of empires in Europe by race or
nationality, language or religion. Black African immigrants are not
sorted with such care (occupying only one category): Asia is split
between Chinese, Korean and Japanese (No Thais, Burmese, or Vietnamese,
let alone any effort to “sort” and categorize South Asians, which was
such a preoccupation of British imperial authorities in the same period
(Dirks 2001). Apart from Mexicans and Cubans, other Central and South
Americans likewise appear unsorted as “Spanish Americans.”

In the zone of focus—Europe—what
seems apparent is a mixture of influences, among which ownership of a
distinct language seems paramount, but with a clear
political component—in that categories with a recognized, historical
state often persist. In some cases, language and state followed the same
lines: so German, French, English, Spanish, and Portugese all seem
somewhat straightforward and transparent. Indeed, this was the implicit
model on which the immigration service had relied before 1898, assuming
that “nationality”—that is, the passport-issuing government—also
revealed something about the individual traveler. Of course, the two
discourses of politics and language-use did not always operate so
easily, and different, inconsistent criteria seem to have been applied
for different cases. There are, for example, no “Swiss” immigrants, the
expectation being that political subjects be categorized as German,
French or Italian, on the basis either of “stock” or language.
Similarly, there are no Belgians, but Flemish (but no Walloons).

And the nation-state of Italy
found its citizens classified as either (North) or (South) –
the distinction being coded as regional. Irish, Welsh, English and
Scotch appear as four different categories, while British (like Swiss, a
“national” rather than a “racial” category) does not. These are
examples of how the information gathered was intended to supplement the
category of “nationality” which had been collected before.

The mismatch between those two
categories—political citizenship or subjecthood, and belonging in
historical, cultural and linguistic terms— was clearest in the case of
the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Turkish Empires, from which many of
the immigrants came. The Immigration Service’s interest in mapping “race
or people” onto “nationality” is shown in Figure 2, below.

FIGURE 2: RACES OR PEOPLES MAPPED ONTO EUROPEAN STATES, 1908.

Source:
enclosure in a letter from the secretary of the Immigration Commission
to William R. Wheeler, dated December 15 1908 (NARA RG 85, Entry 9:
52363/25).

4 I have included Roumanian, in
the light of Folkmar’s recommendations, discussed below, with regard to
Vlahs.Here, the Austrian Empire was represented in sixteen categories
(Bohemian, Bosnian, Croatian, Dalmatian, German, Hebrew, Herzegovinian,
Italian (North), Magyar, Moravian, Polish, Roumanian, Ruthenian
(Russniak), Servian, Slovak, and Slovenian): the Ottoman Empire (as of
1900) by Armenian, Bulgarian, Greek, Hebrew, Roumanian Servian, Syrian
and Turkish). 4 There is an interesting set of claims about language,
then, embedded here: for in distinguishing Bosnian, Croatian, Dalmatian,
Herzegovinian, Servian, and also Montenegrin (included as a separate
category, presumably guided in part by a history of statehood), the list
seems to distinguish between people speaking variants of a common South
Slavic language, more recently labeled Serbo-Croat, and separated by
political frontiers.

The list also served to create
or authorize likeness across new frontiers, between citizens of the
relatively new nation-states of Southeastern Europe—Serbia, Greece,
Roumania and Bulgaria, or the new central European state of Germany, and
non-citizens of shared language or “descent” within empires. This
double recognition—which arguably served as endorsement of irredentist
ambition on the part of such states—contrasted with other cases of
non-recognition: Albanians, for example, a Southeast European people
whose aspirations to national unity were entirely based on common
language, were omitted from the 1898 list as well as this 1908 list, and
were added only in the 1930s (long after the country acquired
statehood).

This list poses a particular
kind of dilemma for any historian, but especially the historian of
Macedonia. It is easy to treat the 1898 list as a bureaucratic relic
which demonstrates the persuasiveness of the ideals of nation-statism of
the period. What, though, of the appearance of Macedonian on the list
in the letter from 1908? The arbitrariness and variability of U.S.
documentary practices becomes particularly clear when one considers the
way in which the 1911 Dictionary of Races or Peoples, commissioned by
Congress and compiled by Daniel and Elnora Folkmar, re-omits Macedonian,
and offers a new formula for discerning the “true” identity of
immigrants from the Balkans, summarized in figure 3.

This interpretation of the “race
or people” of the Ottoman subjects dwelling in the three vilayets of
Salonika, Manastir and Uskub, represents an interesting hybrid of
positions espoused by Ottoman policy-makers and Patriarchate elites. It
postulates that none of the 5 These statistics are derived from the
search engine in Ancestry.com: a random sampling suggests that the
entries are mostly accurate. As a guide to future researchers using this
path, keyword searches can be misleading: “Macedonia” was the name of a
ship sailing regularly from Piraeus to the United States, and so a
search with that term yields a large number of Greeks from “Old Greece”
who traveled that route. Ottoman Empire’s subjects could be “Bulgarian”
or “Servian” (a key plank of the Patriarchate view, also embraced by the
Greek government), and also that there are no Albanians—they are either
Greek (if Greek-speaking) or, if Turkish-speaking, Turkish.

Other subjects of the Empire
might be Wallachian/Roumanian (reflecting official Ottoman policy which
in 1905 recognized a Vlah millet), or Greek or Turkish, depending on
“mother tongue.” Although there is no reference to religion, one can
argue that the language of liturgy, at a pinch, would stand in for
mother tongue – rendering the Slavic-speaking majority of
Turkey-in-Europe’s Christian population, by a process of following the path of least resistance, Greek.

This is, of course, at odds with
what American and British travelers with experience in the region had
reported, with regard to the national consciousness expressed by
the Christian Slavic-speaking majority (Brailsford 1906; Moore 1906;
Upward 1908; Sonnischen 1909). And it is also clear that employees of
the Immigration Service, too, quickly rejected such a schema in the way
they classified immigrants from the region named by immigrants as either
“Turkey-in-Europe” or Macedonia. Even from the compiled statistics of
the Immigration Service, Turkish subjects were recorded as Bulgarian or
Servian, in contravention of these principles. But beyond that, if
one searches the records themselves, the violation of the top-down
categorical system is even more striking. In the ten years 1903-1913, in
Ellis Island alone, 19,011 incoming aliens reported as their last place
of residence either “Macedonia” or “Turkey-in-Europe.”5

Of these, just over 1,000 were
recorded as Greeks, just over 1,000 as Turks, and 170 as Roumanians. In
other words, in only a little over 11% of cases were the criteria
from above applied to process these individuals—a majority of whom
provided as their place of origin not Macedonia, but Turkey in Europe.
Violations in the case of Servians (492) or Albanians (238) were
relatively rare – but still depart from the official practice.
The departure from authorized practice was far more striking in the case
of entrants from Macedonia who were classified as Bulgarian—a category
approved only for “residents of Bulgaria”—who number 3,422 – that is,
over three times the number of those classified as Greeks.

These numbers leave 12,634
aliens from Macedonia still unaccounted for. They entered the official
records under a wholly unauthorized label, as Macedonians from
Macedonia. Almost all have forenames and patronymics largely consistent
with names among today’s Macedonian-speaking citizens of the Republic of
Macedonia. They made their way into other ports as well, though in
smaller numbers – to Baltimore (only 338, out of a total who gave either
Macedonia or Turkey-in-Europe 4,456 as place of origin) and
to Galveston (256 out of 2,731). But according to official US
Immigration policy, and counting practices, as well as the national
histories of Greece and Bulgaria, they should not exist at all.

Looking more closely at the
manifests themselves reveals evidence that this rule-breaking had its
own history. In 1904, for example, as the record reproduced below shows
(figure 3), the inspector took the time to time to enact, at least in
part, official policy, and reclassified men originally listed as
“Macedonians” as “Greek,” “Bulgarian” or “Servian.”

FIGURE 4: Detail from Passenger Manifest of the S.S. Kroonland, arriving 15 March 1904
in New York from Antwerp, and showing the Ellis Island Inspector’s
overwriting of “Macedonian” with Bulgarian” and “Servian” under the
category “Race or People.”

That
leaves open the question of how the category “Macedonian” got entered
on the manifest in the first place—especially when we remember the
interests of the steamship company, and migrant in making the passage
through Ellis Island as smooth as possible.

So we might predict that the
category would disappear. The news that government inspectors were
changing the category of “Macedonian” would filter back to the steamship
companies, their agents, and the ticket-sellers and migrants in
Macedonia, and would-be entrants to the United States would adapt,
tactically. But instead, the opposite occurs. Entrants claiming to be
“Macedonian” appear in larger numbers over the next six years, and
inspectors stop reclassifying them as something else, but allow the
category to stand.

This, I suggest, is
surprising—especially when we remember that, as Papailias puts,
it archives are “imprints of governance, traces of imperial imaginaries
and products of discourses and technologies of documentation… marshaled
by the state to describe, manage and rule various ‘problematic’
populations” (Papailias 2005:6). Immigrants and inspectors are meant to
be disciplined in different ways by the creation of the archive,
yet they are, if you will forgive the pun, manifestly not. What does
this mean? It could be sloppy book-keeping by overworked inspectors. We
could accept the judgment of “experts” of the time who rejected the
appearance of “Macedonian” in this column as either “patriotic
misrepresentation” (Folkmar and Folkmar 1911: 27) or “confusing
and inaccurate” (Letter from Albert Sonnischen, quoted in Balch 1910:
275). These experts were influential at the time, and in official
government statistics, Macedonians were all converted to Bulgarians in
the annual summaries presented to Congress each year. But a massive
breaking of categorical rules by people expected to abide by them—and
here I count both the Inspectors who allow the category to stand, and
the immigrants who 6 Besides the list included as Figure 4, above,
census takers, and investigators for the Dillingham commission report
distinguished “Macedonian” from Bulgarian, as did the Louisiana’s
Commissioner for Immigration in 1908. The term occurs regularly
throughout the archival record—one rather less savory instance being in
a 1909 document where immigrant inspector Marcus Braun, investigating
prostitution, assigns Macedonians a different code number for use in
telegraphic communications to Bulgarians (NARA RG 85, Entry 9:
52363/27)

It makes, then, a source of
friction which I find compelling—a clash between a top-down process of
classifying immigrants according to a somewhat arbitrary set of
government-sponsored, expert-endorsed categories, and a bottom-up
self-classification arising out of ordinary people’s voices. We should
recall, in this regard, the clear evidence that many of those who
came to the US from Macedonia in this period were young men who had been
involved with revolutionary activism against Ottoman rule, or who chose
the path as an alternative to getting caught up in violence. Their
decision to declare themselves as Macedonian at the border—in a context
where they had no reason to take such a risk, and where so much else
about answers given to the inspectors was deeply pragmatic, and designed
to smooth the path into America, rather than introduce friction –
remains, for me, a profound sign of something more than widespread error
or delusion. In this context, it looks deliberate and purposeful, and
maybe even a sign of political consciousness generate this category in
their own assertions—seems to be more than “patriotic misrepresentation”
(except in the sense that any assertion of national identity by anyone
is) and seems hard to dismiss as “confusing” to those for whom, on both
sides of the inspection table, it made sense of their reality. I
therefore take both “expert” responses as signs of exasperation in the
face of “non-expert” practice, and thus as confirmation of how great a
hold the idea of a distinctive, non-Bulgarian, Macedonian population
had become in the process of migration to the United States. And it
spread beyond inspectors and the migrants themselves to leave other
archival traces.6

If the entry “Macedonian”
demonstrates some control by these migrants of the terms on which their
entry into the United States was recorded in the archive, they could
not control how their apparent identity as Macedonians was itself
stigmatized. Here, then, I turn to the “yellow peril” of the title, and
suggest the value of openness to comparative perspectives in thinking
about Macedonian national history, and the place of migration in it. The
phrase occurs in a detailed expose of the way in which Macedonian
labor migration was in part a product of commercial activity involving
steamship agents, the representatives of both certain US states and also
industries, money-lenders. The author, an Immigrant Inspector named
Frank Garbarino, sought in particular to make a case against local
entrepreneurs who made their living from their
fellow-countrymen’s migration. In a letter to his superiors dated March
23 1909, Garbarino wrote, As long as these padrones are permitted to
colonize their aliens and hold a heavy hand over them, just so long will
they be undesirable aliens. They are unable to bring their families
here, and really become the “yellow peril” of the Caucasian race. (NARA, RG 85 Entry 9: 52447/3/part 1: 79.)

The term he chose—“yellow
peril”—was a reflection of particular interest at the time in Chinese
immigration. Historian Donna Gabaccia has analyzed how and why
Italians—and in particular South Italians – came to be referred to in
similar terms, and argues that there were two elements at work—both
structured by existing race relations in the United States (Gabaccia
1997). Thirty years after the American Civil War, discourse about
labor distinguished between “free” and “unfree” labor in racialized
terms, reflecting the 7 I focus here on Gabaccia’s work on labor
relations in particular. Other works that usefully deconstruct racialist
theories prevalent among U.S. political leaders, academics and the
general public of the time, pointing to the inconsistencies around terms
like “race,” “stock” and “nation” include Dyer 1980; Gerstle 2001;
Zeidel 2004. historical
experience of “white” and “black” arrivals in the US, respectively.
Chinese immigration, at a superficial level of skin-color, posed an
anomaly in this discourse. But Gabaccia argues, persuasively, that their
“in-between” classification also owed something to the way in which
this stream of migrants entered the labor force, often through forms of
indenture that were neither fully free nor fully unfree. Indenture is a
stretchable concept: it could refer to relations to a particular company
or factory, or to a money-lender (often predatory) or to a “big man” or
padrone, a labor broker, in other words. Gabaccia argues that Italian
labor migrants often were willing to navigate different forms of
indenture that were stigmatized in a US ideology built on the model of
the free, choice-making individual, operating in a “free market” of
labor. Mobile, bachelor, so-called “coolie” labor, operating in
“work-gangs,” threatened that.7 Gabaccia’s analysis helps us make sense
of how Macedonians lived, worked and were perceived in the United
States. Like Chinese and (South) Italians, these migrants were often
continuing patterns of seasonal labor migration—termed pecalba in
Macedonia—created over generations. There were existing routines of
working in groups or gangs, sharing risks and costs as well as profits,
often living communally (Palairet 1987; see also Schierup and Alund
1987: 64-6). These arrangements are described in the United
States context by labor migrant turned author Stoyan Christowe, as well
as one Chicago sociologist documenting Bulgarian practices (Christowe
1976: 264ff; Hunt 1910). Some field investigators noted their particular
virtues, comparing in particular Macedonian mores favorably with other
groups in their cleanliness, sobriety and thrift (see for example
Roberts 1912: 314.

This on the ground reality,
though, passed ideologues by. One Commissioner in New York, in a 1910
letter to his boss in DC referred to the “backward races” of Southern
and Eastern Europe and imputed to them “very low standards of living, …
filthy habits and … an ignorance which surpasses belief” to Keefe,
September 1910 (Commissioner Williams to Keefe, cited in Vought 2004:
82).

Another view from the same year,
expressed in correspondence from officials in St. Louis to Washington
groups together Italians, Greeks, Bulgarians and Macedonians, as well as
generic “Slavs” from the Austrian and Russian empires of the time,
as …exceedingly ignorant classes of common laborers from the southern
countries of Europe and the Asiatic border who, as a rule, lack
sufficient intelligence to know or understand the plans made for them,
or their destinations. Generally speaking, they are of a class who would
not dare to undertake a journey to America or to seek employment here
without the leadership of the persons responsible for their
coming. (NARA, RG 85 Entry 9: 52885/34A)

While an officer based in
Portland, Oregon describes them as “herded by bosses who,
by intimidation as well as by the natural gregariousness of the men
themselves, keep them in subjection.” (NARA, RG 85 Entry 9: 52885/34)

Gabaccia’s analysis, which
focuses on patterns of work, helps us makes sense of blinkered and
prejudiced top-down perspectives like these. Its racist overtones,
though, also had a scientific alibi. South Italians found their
perceived shortcomings were attributed in part to genetic origin, by the
more eugenically influenced commentators of the time (who argued, in
terms that seem bizarre today, that South Italians had “Saracen” blood).
Macedonians and Bulgarians fell victim to a similar stigmatization,
which had political, racial and linguistic components. First, their
place of origin in Turkey and subjection to Ottoman rule cast doubt on
their fitness to rule themselves, and hence on their Europeanness (and
“whiteness”). Second, the fact that their language was Slavic tied them
to general stereotypes of Slavs as undisciplined, prone to drink. But
they were additionally
stigmatized through the perception that Bulgarian was itself the
most “corrupt” form of Slavic language (Folkmar and Folkmar 1911: 27),
and also, by the contention that Bulgarians were an anomaly in that
their language was Slavic, but their “stock” was Mongol and therefore,
in supposedly objective terms at the time, oriental (and not one of the
European branches) (Folkmar and Folkmar 1911: 108). The official view of
the time was that “Macedonian” was a dialectal (and therefore less
developed) variant of “Bulgarian” in linguistic terms, and a more
primitive sub-group in “racial”terms—even more impure and suspect, then,
than the already impure and suspect Bulgarians with whom they were
always associated.

Macedonian migrants traveling to
the United States, then, found their identities over-determined by a
range of structuring factors far beyond their control, and including
ideas regarding forms of labor, political borders, racialist ideology
among so-called scientists, and concerns around the imagined risks of
miscegenation and crime. Primarily minding their own business, and
pursuing their own family- and community-oriented agendas of survival,
Macedonians were to some degree damned in local eyes, whatever they did.
It is true they were not “free” laborers – but nor, arguably, were
almost all migrants in this and any period. The idea of the “pioneer”
who strikes out for an unknown land simply on faith that a will to work,
and a strong back will see him through, has always been a fiction tied
in with US self-image. Somehow Macedonian migrants, like South
Italians, Chinese, and other laborers of the time, with existing
structures of labor organization that flexed to incorporate transoceanic
migration, found themselves cast as “other” and also as “backward.”
Their tactical, self-interested, and contingent subjection to
industrial businesses, labor agents, was classified as a character
defect, shared by a whole people.

Where, then, does all this leave
us? I conclude by suggesting an analogy between this specific research
and the wider task of writing Macedonian national history. I think
that the data I have briefly discussed here points toward one specific
form of history. I am increasingly concerned with empirical evidence; as
I said, I’m interested in other people’s voices and conversations, who
experienced things that I haven’t and I consider my main task to try to
understand and convey as much of that experience as I can. But I also
want to put that evidence to work not to answer the demands of others,
but to question the systems of power in which the demands are made. I
consider that Macedonian national history has been dominated by efforts
to find the irrefutable proof of historical longevity, of a collective,
long-suffering people moving through time. But this is an
impossible, Sisyphean task; no nation in the world can meet that
standard. I began this project thinking I could perhaps prove that
people called themselves Macedonians on the way to America in the early
twentieth century, long before the establishment of a
Macedonian Republic within Federal Yugoslavia. I still think that they
did: But I think the more important finding is to expose the complex
structure of economic realities, power relations and embedded racism
that shaped people’s experience, and to use the data to highlight the
contingency of this and all such systems of ranking peoples and
the authenticity of their national identities by pseudo-scientific
means.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

National Archives and Records Administration, Immigration and Naturalization Records, Record Group 85: Entry 9.

Palairet, Michael. 1979. “The ‘New’ Immigration and the Newest: Slavic Migrations from the Balkans to American and Industrial Europe since the Late Nineteenth Century.” In T.C. Smout (ed.) The Search for Wealth and Stability: Essays in Economic and Social History presented to M.W. Flinn. London: MacMillan. 43-65. __. 1987. “The Migrant Workers of the Balkans and their Villages (18th Century – World War II).” In Klaus Roth (ed.) Handwerk in Mittel- und Sudösteuropa. Im Selbstverlag der Sudösteurpa-Gesellschaft: Munich: 23-46.